Integration Team Progress Report
The original motivation for the Design Brainstorming Board (DBB) was based on several key ideas:
- establish an online forum providing users the ability to engage in collaborative brainstorming activities.
- elevate avenues of communication above the typical textual approach to include sketches, images, links, associations.
- enable users to add, modify, delete notes (sketches, text, etc.) and track brainstorming progress over time.
- provide tools for analysis, evaluation, and externalization of brainstorming notes.
In our subsequent survey of existing applications that offer similar services, we have found the following (non-comprehensive) list of applications, in various stages of development and deployment:
Thinkature
Their slogan is "real-time collaboration for the web". Their main focus is real-time collaboration within a single online workspace. Features include text chat, voice chat, and drawing simple sketches and uploading images to the workspace. Their idea of the "card" is similar to the DBB's idea of the "note". Their cards may also illustrate associations to one another (a la databases) and can be separated by color.
Group Skribbles
An ongoing research project at C.U., Group Skribbles introduces the idea of a public and private workspace. The concept of the "post-it" is similar to the "card" from Thinkature and the "note" in DBB. Users can sketch images or write text into a post-it on their private workspace and drop composed post-its into the public workspace. Similarly, notes in the public workspace can be moved into the private workspace for editting.
Skrbl
Skrl is a deployed software that offers similar functionality to the above items. Termed the "complete web whiteboard", Skrl enables users to collaborate in public and also work in their own private space. Features include writing notes, making sketches, and sharing images and files. It is unknown whether users of Skrbl can simultaneously access the public and private workspaces in the way that Group Skribbles does. Also unknown is whether users are able to manage associations between notes powerfully as Thinkature.
[Publication] PDAs as Input Devices in Brainstorming and Creative Discussions.
This research paper published with IEEE in 2006 explores the use of PDAs as input devices in brainstorming sessions. The paper describes the Mobile Notes architecture and application. The keys of this architecture are high levels of cohesion with low coupling: mobile input devices collaborate heterogeneously under various scenarios. The impact of the Mobile Notes architecture on learning environments is discussed.
Acquainted with some of the existing tools for aiding brainstorms, our group now proceeds to narrow the problem context for our DBB project into several specific problems:
- Develop evaluation metrics for brainstorms.
- Mind mapping (meta maps).
- Intelligent methods for navigating from brainstorming idea-to-idea via keyword extraction.
Our hope is to choose one of these problems to work on and implement it to an as yet unspecified amount of progress.
The Integration Project Team
Yingdan Huang
Chen-Chung Liu
Praful Mangalath
Peng Shao